Wednesday, August 24, 2016

The Long-Term Prospects for the Libertarian and Green Parties

by Michael Dorf
My latest Verdict column pitches Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) as an idea that both small parties and the two major parties should support. Don't know what IRV is? Read the column. The basic idea is that IRV makes it possible to vote for a minor-party candidate without risking playing spoiler, because if he or she (as expected) does poorly, your second-choice (or successive-choice) candidate gets your vote after a reallocation. Reducing the likelihood of spoilers, I argue, is good for both third parties and major parties.

In this post, I want to look at the long-term prospects of the two currently most viable third parties: the Libertarians (currently running Gary Johnson for president) and the Greens (currently running Jill Stein). I'll focus on the long term rather than their impact on the 2016 election, because I regard the current election as highly unusual. Much if not most of the support we are now seeing for Johnson and Stein is rooted in opposition to Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton as candidates, rather than simply opposition to their respective policy positions or--what I'm really after--dissatisfaction with the policy space occupied by the two major parties.

Politics occurs around a potentially infinite range of issues, so I'll have to make simplifying assumptions. I'll assume that we can break down national politics into three groupings, each with policy positions falling on a spectrum from left to right between:

Economic policy: Redistributivist/Regulatory versus Laissez-Faire

Social policy: Liberal versus Conservative

Foreign policy: Dovish versus Hawkish

Of course, even that oversimplification needs to be even more oversimplified to give us a sense of the parties, but I'm up to the task! So, here is my chart of the major and minor parties:

Party

Economic Policy

Social Policy

Foreign Policy

Democratic

Redistributivist/Regulatory

Liberal

Hawkish

Republican

Laissez-Faire

Conservative

Very Hawkish

Libertarian

Very Laissez-Faire

Liberal

Dovish

Green

Very Redistributivist/Regulatory

Very Liberal

Very Dovish

Now one can quibble with some of these characterizations. For example, some politicians who are generally libertarian hold positions on some issues--especially abortion--that code as conservative in our politics. No doubt there are other ways in which one could quibble with my typology, but that's because, as I've noted, it is a deliberate oversimplification in order to try to gain some perspective.

Okay, so what can we observe about the chart?

1) Both the Greens and the Libertarians are more dovish than either major party. That observation (if correct) suggests a number of possibilities. One is that there is an unsatisfied demand for a more dovish/less interventionist foreign policy, i.e., the American people are not being adequately represented in foreign policy matters. Another--given the fact that the major parties have incentives to align their policies close to the center of public opinion--is that the center of U.S. public opinion is fairly hawkish, except when a foreign war goes badly. Even then, it takes quite some time for the electorate to punish a party for being too hawkish. For example, the Afghanistan and Iraq wars were already going badly in 2004, but it wasn't until the 2006 midterm election that the incumbent party paid a price. Whatever the explanation, the fact that both the Libertarians and the Greens are more dovish than either major party suggests that if there is to be a competition between these two third parties, it will be over domestic policy.

2) With respect to (both economic and social) domestic policy, the Libertarians look to have a clear advantage over the Greens, if the goal of a third party is to win elections and supplant one of the major parties. The Libertarians occupy a policy space -- economically conservative and socially liberal -- that neither major party occupies. By contrast, the Greens are simply more extreme versions of the Democrats.

There is nothing set in stone about the upper-left-hand four boxes of my chart. We could well imagine a two-party system in which one party is economically progressive and socially conservative (think Mike Huckabee early in his Arkansas governorship) and the other is economically conservative and socially liberal (think Bill Weld as Massachusetts governor). Indeed, Trump's success among white working-class Republican voters as an anti-trade pro-entitlements candidate suggests that there is a possible post-Trump Republican Party that is redistributionist/regulatory and socially conservative. If one major party were to drift that way, it would make sense for the other to take the other two positions, i.e., laissez-faire and socially liberal. Because the Libertarian Party already occupies that space, it is also possible to imagine a post-realignment world in which it supplants one of the major parties (which one?!), while the remaining major party drifts to occupy the economically progressive/socially conservative niche.

3) Accordingly, I conclude that the Libertarians have a better chance than do the Greens of becoming one of the two major parties. (In the column, I note that our system ensures that we will mostly have two dominant parties.) But that doesn't mean that the Libertarians have a good chance of supplanting either the Republican or Democratic Party. Despite numerous shifts in our politics, we have had those two major parties for over a century and a half. If there is to be realignment into parties that split up economic and social issues differently from the way that the two major parties do, it is much more likely that the realignment will occur within the existing parties. And I suspect that what we are likely to see is not a new axis of politics but the growing realization that there isn't much appetite for laissez-faire. It may well turn out that the answer to Thomas Frank's question What's the Matter With Kansas?, is nothing: It's just that heretofore, if a voter wanted to vote for a social conservative, he also usually had to take him in a laissez-faire package. A future GOP that is socially conservative and at least modestly redistributionist/regulatory would deeply frustrate closeted socially liberal laissez-faire GOP donors, but would do better at election time.

4) Meanwhile, although there is little likelihood of the Green Party succeeding in supplanting the Democrats (and even less likelihood that the Greens would supplant the Republicans), the people who currently support the Greens will likely find that they can do reasonably well by moving the Democratic Party. Here the math is, or at least should be, obvious. If you're trying to move policy to the left of the more left-leaning party, you will have a much better chance of succeeding by operating within that party--where your primary electorate is substantially to the left of the median voter--than in the general electorate. Put differently, the Green Party cannot hope to succeed as a national party qua party, but it can accomplish many of its policy goals by moving the Democratic Party to the left.

5) I am aware of a line of criticism of the Greens and other third parties in the U.S. that says that they should build themselves up in state and local elections, rather than by running spoilers for the presidency. I generally agree with the bottom line of that criticism, but I would add that much of the dynamic that makes third parties fail in presidential elections operates in other elections as well. First-past-the-post elections tend to create a two-party system. That's Duverger's Law. Some jurisdictions allow "fusion" candidacies--in which a minor party can cross-endorse a major party candidate, thereby allowing adherents of the minor party to vote for a major-party candidate on the minor-party line, and thus keeping the minor party viable (i.e., above some threshold of support needed to be on the ballot). But not all jurisdictions permit fusion candidates, and the SCOTUS upheld fusion bans in a 1997 case.

6) Thus, to quote either Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump, the system is "rigged" in favor of two parties--although most of the rigging is done by Duverger's Law, not by any conspiracy.

7 comments:

How does a self-described anarcho libertarian fit into the future of the Libertarian Party? Of course there are other variations of libertarians in what is numerically a small party, suggesting difficulties in ruling if successful in an election.

While I am a bit of a voting methods buff, I think it's important to say one thing:

Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) is TERRIBLE. It produces bad results in real-world situations. See: http://rangevoting.org/Burlington.html (Admittedly, this source is more than a little biased.) It's really unfortunate that people focus on IRV, which is easy to understand, but produces poor results.

Personally, I'm in favor of either Condorcet voting (because it generally produces the best result from a "one person, one vote" perspective, so long as there is a condorcet winner) or Approval voting (because it's easy to tally and easy to understand, while generally producing much better results than IRV or plurality voting.)

Shag is talking totally theoretically in his first question, I assume.

The rough summaries are more fitting for the candidates in place. There is a dove wing of the Democratic Party (House Dems on average voted against Iraq War II) and foreign policy etc. split libertarians.

But, Hillary Clinton is more hawkish and Gary Johnson (though personally against abortion) has put forth socially liberal policies and more dovish foreign policy. The big caveat is that libertarian economic policies in practice can be socially illiberal. Anyway, we also see the Libertarian Party getting one percent of the vote (more in a few places) in recent years while Greens have a fraction of that.

Are there any equal protection (one person, one vote) implications associated with IRV?

Two scenarios:

1. Person A only ranks one candidate2. Person B ranks 4 preferences

Are those an equal number of votes as a constitutional matter? Could it be argued that person B is actually casting some number of “virtual votes” that carry greater weight? Person A is locked in with one shot; person B might be casting two or three actual votes, at least as a transactional matter.

@egarber: There have been a number of court cases regarding IRV and its forebears that have basically all said what I consider to be the obvious response. So long as everyone is allowed the same opportunity to express their vote, there is no vote dilution due to alternative voting schemes like IRV.

In IRV (and Condorcet voting, which looks the same to the voter, but computes the result differently), not ranking a candidate is equivalent to saying that you dislike all other alternative candidates equally.

It certainly could be argued (especially for approval voting) that people who vote for more than one candidate are receiving more than one vote, but this argument has generally been rejected by the courts that have considered it.

@JoeOne of the things I find interesting is that approval voting is easier to explain and generally produces better results than IRV. However, our intuition from social situations is that it "feels wrong" and thus we don't do it. Also, the most obvious description "sounds like" a violation of one person, one vote.

IRV fits people's mental model of something we already understand from the political sphere, runoff elections. As such, it seems like a good idea as it just combines the cost of the runoff election with the original election, and saves money. However, it's hard to fill out a paper IRV ballot in a way that is machine readable. It's doable, but not easy. Further, IRV is susceptible to mathematical problems that seem theoretical but actually show up in practice, particularly when third parties are on the verge of becoming major parties.

Approval voting instead looks like something generally rejected from the social sphere. It's that kid who instead of voting once when you're trying to decide what to do instead votes for multiple choices. However, the difference is that EVERYONE is invited and even encouraged to vote for multiple choices that they find acceptable. It turns out that this method mathematically produces very good results, both in social situations and in political elections. Unfortunately, it feels like cheating because we're generally socially conditioned to think of this kind of voting as cheating. Approval voting is very easy to do in a machine-readable way. Rather than only bubbling in a single choice in an election, they are allowed to bubble in multiple choices.